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Festive special: Real slow food

THE next time you mourn a forgotten morsel that’s slipped past its use-by date, remember that things could always be worse. Take the case of Fidelia Bates of Tecumseh, Michigan&colon; after baking a fruit cake for Thanksgiving in November 1877, the unfortunate Mrs Bates promptly expired. This presented a rather delicate question at the family farmhouse&colon; who would be the first to eat a piece of the dead woman’s cake?

As it turned out, nobody was. Mrs Bates’s family has resisted temptation for 129 years, and counting. “It’s hard, it’s crystallised, it’s fossilised,” says her 86-year-old great-grandson Morgan Ford. “Nobody wanted to eat it after she passed away, and so now I have it.” Kept under a glass lid and stored high up (“to keep it away from the kids”, he explains) in a cupboard for 75 years, the cake moved over to Ford’s house in 1952 and has stayed there ever since, save for the occasional appearance on TV or at his grandchildren’s show-and-tell. The fruit cake has attracted a few daredevil gourmands over the years. “My uncle was the first to try a tiny piece off it, about 25 years ago,” says Ford. A few more crumbs have been sampled recently, though Ford judges the veteran confection to be not quite its old self. Maybe it needs more time to mature.

“My mother used to be afraid to take the lid off, worried that it’d fall apart,” he says. “We did lift the lid off when it turned 100 and for a moment we could smell rum. But you can’t smell anything now.”